Fake Stephen Conroy's 'fake' sacking

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Fake Stephen Conroy, Leslie Nassar, says he has been sacked
by Telstra over satirical posts on his personal blog and Twitter
account.

But after queries from this website this morning, Telstra denied
this, saying he "has not been fired". However it said: "We have
started a disciplinary process against him."

Nassar - who impersonated Communications Minister Stephen Conroy on
Twitter and criticised Telstra for trying to cover up that
it was pressuring him to close the account - got the bad news this
morning.

Now, it appears Telstra is also trying to cover up firing him.
Nassar said: "They were 100 per cent clear with me this
morning."

Nassar said Telstra's chief technology officer Hugh Bradlow told
him he had been sacked for contravening his workplace
agreement.

"It contravened what they called the 'Telstra values clause',
and the Telstra values clause basically states that you don't say
anything about Telstra publicly as an employee unless you've got
prior permission," Nassar told smh.com.au.

"So if you've got a comment or a personal position you can't
mention it."

Telstra said the "disciplinary" action against Nassar was
started not because of his Fake Stephen Conroy Twitter posts but
"because of his ongoing unauthorised public statements about
Telstra, including abusive comments towards a Telstra
employee".

When Nassar was outed as Fake Stephen Conroy earlier this
month, Telstra, scared of the political ramifications, tried to
silence him by asking him to shut the Twitter account and stop
communicating with the media.

After this was reported by news sites, Telstra's social media
adviser, Mike Hickinbotham, wrote in a statement on Telstra's Now We Are Talking
(NWAT) site that the telco did not try to shut Nassar up nor tell
him to cease making the Fake Stephen Conroy posts.

This directly contradicted earlier comments by Nassar, who hit
back with an angry Twitter message telling his bosses not to "throw
me under the f---ing bus just to make Telstra look social-media
savvy".

"I was fine with your NWAT double-speak, but f--- you if you
think I'm standing for that," Nassar wrote to Hickinbotham on
Twitter.

Nassar took the comments on NWAT as giving him the all clear to
continue writing as Fake Stephen Conroy.

When business journalist Alan Kohler suggested Nassar become
Telstra's new CEO, he wrote a tongue-in-cheek blog post outlining
what he would do if he was in charge of the telco.

Some of the suggestions he made were "strategic redundancies",
axing BigPond Music, replacing Telstra's T-Life stores with Apple
Stores and making it compulsory for all staff to write "something
satirical and/or borderline offensive" prior to their mid-year
performance reviews.

Nassar said today that the blog post and his lashing out at
Hickinbotham were the last straw for Telstra.

"I did the right thing, when they asked me to stop. I stopped
and then they came out with this statement saying that I hadn't
been told to stop and then they continued to perpetuate it," he
said.

Nassar said he only regretted the harsh language he used in his
Twitter comments to Hickinbotham, but at the time believed it was
appropriate, given the medium.

"I do believe in having a level of loyalty to a company but when
it's clear that that loyalty isn't reciprocated to the employees
then it's not really a company that I want to be working for."